Arch Linux

KimTjik

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2007-08-22

Posts: 715

Re: OSS4 vs ALSA vs Pusleaudio vs Jack

I wasn't aware of the difficulties behind OSS4. I can understand Hannu's point of view. Does anybody know whether some project is started to save OSS4?

To bad Fedora choose to work on Pulse. I don't know whether it's a matter of license (OSS4 having a BSD license) but if some open-source force would be able to pull OSS4 up on track it would have been Fedora.

I never figured out a better way of getting a smaller mixer implemented in XFCE though. ossxmix gives you sometimes a mixer for studio with zillions of controlers and no way to clean it up. That however probably only me not searching enough for a workaround.

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Re: OSS4 vs ALSA vs Pusleaudio vs Jack

OSS4 is the sound system for all the BSDs, IIRC. Maybe I'm an idiot, but it seems to me there's no way the BSD devs are going to let this die.

Last edited by Gullible Jones (2008-11-17 14:02:37)

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Re: OSS4 vs ALSA vs Pusleaudio vs Jack

Update: aha, FreeBSD already forked it, and apparently their version is better. With luck someone might port it to Linux...

KimTjik

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2007-08-22

Posts: 715

Re: OSS4 vs ALSA vs Pusleaudio vs Jack

Update: aha, FreeBSD already forked it, and apparently their version is better. With luck someone might port it to Linux...

Wow, that was good news... even if it might be old, but I haven't seen that piece of information either. How similar is the code between a BSD fork and a Linux one? What I wonder is, could a Linux fork easily update according to BSD development?

Redroar

Member

Registered: 2008-03-17

Posts: 200

Re: OSS4 vs ALSA vs Pusleaudio vs Jack

Basically, it gets down to this:

Why in the hell did ALSA even come into existence? Why didn't others just pick up the slack on OSS? It seems that improving upon an accepted base rather than just making some new crap up would have been prudent. If for no other reason than to keep the API consistent. NOW we're moving towards a whole other friggin API with Pulse.

Dammit, this is a perfect example of everything that's wrong with Linux. Some guy who was messing around with his own sound system jumped at the chance when OSS went closed-source. Now we have an incompatible, poorly documented, Linux-only mess.

Let's just look at the BSDs. They expanded and built a foundation on OSS, and it's really quite good.

Urrrgggh, this crap is making me want to use a BSD again, just to get away from all of this lack of direction in Linux.

.....Sorry for the rant. It just seems to me that Canonical chose the wrong OS. Ubuntu should have been based on a BSD, and Linux should have become the "other one"

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Stop looking at my signature. It betrays your nature.

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Re: OSS4 vs ALSA vs Pusleaudio vs Jack

That's the feeling I'm getting too... The only issue, I think is BSD's hardware support, which is frankly shabby. Just take a look at ACPI on FreeBSD for instance.

Re the FreeBSD fork: that's ooooold. news. The BSD version of OSS was forked way before OSS4 (probably before the commercial OSS).

Redroar

Member

Registered: 2008-03-17

Posts: 200

Re: OSS4 vs ALSA vs Pusleaudio vs Jack

Not exactly......The hardware FreeBSD does fully support, well, it tends to work really well, IMO. Soundcards, wireless, etc, if they took the time and got it to work, then it works well.

But it supports only a tiny fraction of the hardware Linux does, just because of it's lower exposure.

And yeah, the ACPI sucks.

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Stop looking at my signature. It betrays your nature.

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Re: OSS4 vs ALSA vs Pusleaudio vs Jack

Also, it needs a PnP BIOS (at least for some hardware).

Army

Member

Registered: 2007-12-07

Posts: 1,784

Re: OSS4 vs ALSA vs Pusleaudio vs Jack

If BSDs supported more hardware or at leasts everything I use, I would switch in a second! But I depend on the hardware support of linux and mostly frustrating, alsa... Well let's see what the future tells us